I will admit that I felt more than a little bit of trepidation going into this first run of episodes for BEASTARS' final season. I have been singing the praises of this series for years, and without spoiling anything at all, Studio Orange's masterful adaptation of Paru Itagaki's manga has reached the point where the source material started to lose me a little bit.

On the surface, I love the potential of BEASTARS taking Legoshi out of Cherryton Academy and forcing him to confront the messy world of living as an adult anthropomorphic wolf who must battle his crippling temptation to consume the flesh of the tiny rabbit girlfriend that he is also a hopeless simp over. As you can tell by that plot description, this new status quo makes for a very busy new season. Legoshi, Haru, Louis, and Juno are all essentially living out completely separate lives and stories—even more so than last season—and that says nothing about the new characters we have to reckon with in this new storyline. There's Yahya, the brooding Beastar detective who is investigating the sudden appearance of a new energy drink that is laced with the bones and flesh of dead herbivores (a normal thing to happen in this normal society); Gosha is Legoshi's badass komodo dragon grandpa (his biological grandfather, mind) who also happens to be Yahya's former partner; Seven is the exhausted but sympathetic sheep who helps Legoshi adjust to his new normal as an independent adult; and, of course, there's Melon, the deranged hybrid leopard-gazelle who quenches his predatory instincts with serial-murder sprees.

It's a lot for this already ambitious and often overstuffed series to handle. I was worried that the anime would inherit the same faults that caused me to grow weary of what was once my favorite running manga. If I have learned anything over these last few years, I should trust Studio Orange's creative instincts. Not only has this team done an excellent job of handling the BEASTARS adaptation so far, but their spectacular work reimagining the story of the original Trigun for Trigun Stampede proved that they have the chops to take another creator's material in bold, new directions. BEASTARS' final season is nothing so transformative as Trigun Stampede, but even though it is still telling the same fundamental story as Paru Itagaki's manga, it benefits so much from its clarity of vision and purpose.

Throughout this season, BEASTARS streamlines the material it is adapting and hones this final story arc into something that works as a continuation of the story that began back in 2019. Sure, the characters are still scattered across different storylines for much of the season, and I'm sure the more methodical and less focused structure will turn off some fans. Still, these twelve episodes function as a perfectly compelling and coherent season. The escalating procedural showdown between Yahya and Melon is pretty good stuff once it gets going, and even if we have to wait a while for Legoshi, Haru, and the other characters to get involved in all of the madness, there are plenty of great character beats to enjoy in the meantime. Gosha is an awesome addition to the cast that is bound to become a fan favorite. Louis and Juno's star-crossed romance remains one of my favorite storylines in the show, too. It is fun to see the BEASTARS world continues to expand with the introduction of aquatic fish, marine mammals, and not to mention, you know, an actual Beastar. Could I complain that Haru still doesn't get nearly enough to do? Sure, but the episodes that focus on her always tumultuous romance with the World's Dumbest Goofball Wolf are some of the season's best and funniest chapters, and her lack of screen time doesn't hurt nearly as much as it did in the manga.

The biggest flaw of this season comes packed in with its inherently incomplete nature. This is just the first “Part” of the Final Season, after all, so I don't think I'm spoiling anything when I say that the story is only just starting to pick up steam by the time Episode 12 ends with one of the most literal examples of a cliffhanger that I've ever seen. We know that the second “Part” is on its way though, so at least we won't have to suffer, waiting through that agonizing liminal space of not knowing whether Netflix will stupidly cancel another one of its better original series' abruptly.

Otherwise, despite the shift in scenery and the expansion of scope, this final season of BEASTARS is packed full of everything that's made the series great up to this point. Studio Orange's work in 3D anime remains top-tier, and the English and Japanese dubs continue to bring the show's cast of loveable, insane, and frankly weird-as-hell characters to life with aplomb. Best of all, the anime is elevating its source material to such a degree that for the first time in years, I am feeling excited to see how BEASTARS concludes its weird and wild saga.